Heterogeneous Systems Dominate the Green500

November 20, 2013

The November 2013 release of the Green500 list was announced today at the SC13 conference in Denver, Colorado. Continuing the trend from previous years, heterogeneous supercomputing systems totally dominate the top 10 spots of the Green500.

A heterogeneous system uses computational building blocks that consist of two or more types of “computing brains.” These types of computing brains include traditional processors (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and co-processors. In this edition of the Green500, one system smashes through the 4-billion floating-point operation per second (gigaflops) per watt barrier.

TSUBAME-KFC, a heterogeneous supercomputing system developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech) in Japan, tops the list with an efficiency of 4.5 gigaflops/watt. Each computational node within TSUBAME-KFC consists of two Intel Ivy Bridge processors and four NVIDIA Kepler GPUs. In fact, all systems in the top ten of the Green500 use a similar architecture, i.e., Intel CPUs combined with NVIDIA GPUs. Wilkes, a supercomputer housed at Cambridge University, takes the second spot. The third position is filled by the HA-PACS TCA system at the University of Tsukuba. Of particular note, this list also sees two petaflop systems, each capable of computing over one quadrillion operations per second, achieve an efficiency of over 3 gigaflops/watt, namely Piz Daint at Swiss National Supercomputing Center and TSUBAME 2.5 at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Thus, Piz Daint is the greenest petaflop supercomputer on the Green500. As a point of reference, Tianhe-2, the fastest supercomputer in the world according to the Top500 list, achieves an efficiency of 1.9 gigaflops/watt.

This list marks a number of “firsts” for the Green500. It is the first time that a supercomputer has broken through the 4 gigaflops/watt barrier. Second, it is first time that all of the top 10 systems on the Green500 are heterogeneous systems. Third, it is the first time that the average of the measured power consumed by the systems on the Green500 dropped with respect to the previous edition of the list. “A decrease in the average measured power coupled with an overall increase in performance is an encouraging step along the trail to exascale,” noted Wu Feng of the Green500. Fourth, assuming that TSUBAME-KFC’s energy efficiency can be maintained for an exaflop system, it is the first time that an extrapolation to an exaflop supercomputer has dropped below 300 megawatts (MW), specifically 222 MW. “This 222-MW power envelope is still a long way away from DARPA’s target of an exaflop system in the 20-MW power envelope,” says Feng.

Starting with this release, the Little Green500 list only includes machines with power values submitted directly to the Green500. In fact, there are more than 400 systems that have submitted directly to the Green500 over the past few years. As in previous years, the Little Green500 list has better overall efficiency than the Green500 list on average.

Earlier this year, the Green500 adopted new methodologies for measuring the power of supercomputing systems and providing a more accurate representation of the energy efficiency of large-scale systems. In June 2013, the Green500 formally adopted measurement rules (a.k.a. “Level 1” measurements), developed in cooperation with the Energy-Efficient High-Performance Computing Working Group (EE HPC WG). Moreover, power-measurement methodologies with higher precision and accuracy were developed as a part of this effort (a.k.a. “Level 2” and “Level 3” measurements). With growing support and interest in the energy efficiency of large-scale computing systems, the Green500 is welcoming two more submissions at Level 2 and Level 3 than in the previous edition of the Green500 list. Of particular note, Piz Daint, the greenest petaflop supercomputer in the world, submitted the highest-quality Level 3 measurement.

The Green500 has provided a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world since November 2007. For decades, the notion of supercomputer “performance” has been synonymous with “speed.” This particular focus has led to the emergence of supercomputers that consume egregious amounts of electrical power and produce so much heat that extravagant cooling facilities must be constructed to ensure proper operation. In addition, when there is an emphasis on speed as the ultimate metric, it often comes at the expense of other performance metrics, such as energy efficiency, reliability, availability, and usability. As a result, there has been an extraordinary increase in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a supercomputer. Consequently, the Green500 seeks to raise the awareness in energy efficiency of supercomputing and to drive it as a first-order design constraint on par with speed.

By Thomas Ayres

Claiming no less than a reshaping of the future of Intel-dominated datacenter computing, Qualcomm Technologies, the market leader in smartphone chips, announced the forthcoming availability of what it says is the world’s first 10nm processor for servers, based on ARM Holding’s chip designs. Read more…

By John Russell

Sometime in Q2 2017 the first ‘results’ of the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACS4C) will become publicly available according to Rick Stevens. He leads one of three JDACS4C pilot projects pressing deep learning (DL) into service in the War on Cancer. The pilots, supported in part by DOE exascale funding, not only seek to do good by advancing cancer research and therapy but also to advance deep learning capabilities and infrastructure with an eye towards eventual use on exascale machines. Read more…

By John Russell

Transferring data from one data center to another in search of lower regional energy costs isn’t a new concept, but Yahoo Japan is putting the idea into transcontinental effect with a system that transfers 50TB of data a day from Japan to the U.S., where electricity costs a quarter of the rates in Japan. Read more…

By Staff

Who is Dell EMC and why should you care? Glad you asked is Jim Ganthier’s quick response. Ganthier is SVP for validated solutions and high performance computing for the new (even bigger) technology giant Dell EMC following Dell’s acquisition of EMC in September. In this case, says Ganthier, the blending of the two companies is a 1+1 = 5 proposition. Not bad math if you can pull it off. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Sometime in Q2 2017 the first ‘results’ of the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACS4C) will become publicly available according to Rick Stevens. He leads one of three JDACS4C pilot projects pressing deep learning (DL) into service in the War on Cancer. The pilots, supported in part by DOE exascale funding, not only seek to do good by advancing cancer research and therapy but also to advance deep learning capabilities and infrastructure with an eye towards eventual use on exascale machines. Read more…

By John Russell

Who is Dell EMC and why should you care? Glad you asked is Jim Ganthier’s quick response. Ganthier is SVP for validated solutions and high performance computing for the new (even bigger) technology giant Dell EMC following Dell’s acquisition of EMC in September. In this case, says Ganthier, the blending of the two companies is a 1+1 = 5 proposition. Not bad math if you can pull it off. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

At first blush, and maybe second blush too, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) purchase of SGI seems like an unambiguous win-win. SGI’s advanced shared memory technology, its popular UV product line (Hanna), deep vertical market expertise, and services-led go-to-market capability all give HPE a leg up in its drive to remake itself. Bear in mind HPE came into existence just a year ago with the split of Hewlett-Packard. The computer landscape, including HPC, is shifting with still unclear consequences. One wonders who’s next on the deal block following Dell’s recent merger with EMC. Read more…

By John Russell

In 1994, two NASA employees connected 16 commodity workstations together using a standard Ethernet LAN and installed open-source message passing software that allowed their number-crunching scientific application to run on the whole “cluster” of machines as if it were a single entity. Read more…

By Vincent Natoli, Stone Ridge Technology

After offering OpenPower Summit attendees a limited preview in April, IBM is unveiling further details of its next-gen CPU, Power9, which the tech mainstay is counting on to regain market share ceded to rival Intel. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Amazon Web Services has seeded its cloud with Nvidia Tesla K80 GPUs to meet the growing demand for accelerated computing across an increasingly-diverse range of workloads. The P2 instance family is a welcome addition for compute- and data-focused users who were growing frustrated with the performance limitations of Amazon's G2 instances, which are backed by three-year-old Nvidia GRID K520 graphics cards. Read more…

By John Russell

The Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) hit an important milestone today with the announcement of its first round of funding, moving the nation closer to its goal of reaching capable exascale computing by 2023. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

ARM and Fujitsu today announced a scalable vector extension (SVE) to the ARMv8-A architecture intended to enhance ARM capabilities in HPC workloads. Fujitsu is the lead silicon partner in the effort (so far) and will use ARM with SVE technology in its post K computer, Japan’s next flagship supercomputer planned for the 2020 timeframe. This is an important incremental step for ARM, which seeks to push more aggressively into mainstream and HPC server markets. Read more…

By John Russell

Not long after revealing more details about its next-gen Power9 chip due in 2017, IBM today rolled out three new Power8-based Linux servers and a new version of its Power8 chip featuring Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect. Read more…

By John Russell

Vector instructions, once a powerful performance innovation of supercomputing in the 1970s and 1980s became an obsolete technology in the 1990s. But like the mythical phoenix bird, vector instructions have arisen from the ashes. Here is the history of a technology that went from new to old then back to new. Read more…

By Lynd Stringer

Leading Solution Providers

The 48th edition of the TOP500 list is fresh off the presses and while there is no new number one system, as previously teased by China, there are a number of notable entrants from the US and around the world and significant trends to report on. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

At the Intel Developer Forum, held in San Francisco this week, Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager Diane Bryant announced the launch of Intel's Silicon Photonics product line and teased a brand-new Phi product, codenamed "Knights Mill," aimed at machine learning workloads. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

With OpenPOWER activity ramping up and IBM’s prominent role in the upcoming DOE machines Summit and Sierra, it’s a good time to look at how the IBM POWER CPU stacks up against the x86 Xeon Haswell CPU from Intel. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

The freshly minted Dell EMC division of Dell Technologies is on a mission to take HPC mainstream with a strategy that hinges on engineered solutions, beginning with a focus on three industry verticals: manufacturing, research and life sciences. "Unlike traditional HPC where everybody bought parts, assembled parts and ran the workloads and did iterative engineering, we want folks to focus on time to innovation and let us worry about the infrastructure," said Jim Ganthier, senior vice president, validated solutions organization at Dell EMC Converged Platforms Solution Division. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Neuromorphic computing – brain inspired computing – has long been a tantalizing goal. The human brain does with around 20 watts what supercomputers do with megawatts. And power consumption isn’t the only difference. Fundamentally, brains ‘think differently’ than the von Neumann architecture-based computers. While neuromorphic computing progress has been intriguing, it has still not proven very practical. Read more…

By John Russell

HPC container platform Singularity is just six months out from its 1.0 release but already is making inroads across the HPC research landscape. It's in use at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where Singularity founder Gregory Kurtzer has worked in the High Performance Computing Services (HPCS) group for 16 years. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Micron Technology used last week’s Flash Memory Summit to roll out its new line of 3D XPoint memory technology jointly developed with Intel while demonstrating the technology in solid-state drives. Micron claimed its Quantx line delivers PCI Express (PCIe) SSD performance with read latencies at less than 10 microseconds and writes at less than 20 microseconds. Read more…

By George Leopold

Tucked in a back section of the SC16 exhibit hall, quantum computing pioneer D-Wave has been talking up its new 2000-qubit processor announced in September. Forget for a moment the criticism sometimes aimed at D-Wave. This small Canadian company has sold several machines including, for example, ones to Lockheed and NASA, and has worked with Google on mapping machine learning problems to quantum computing. In July Los Alamos National Laboratory took possession of a 1000-quibit D-Wave 2X system that LANL ordered a year ago around the time of SC15. Read more…